[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJIuYgIvKsc&feature=channel_video_title]Be a HERO and Help STOP SOPA Now!! I&#39;ll tell you How! This Video that Must Be SHARED! - YouTube[/ame]

Basically what the video says is that the backers of SOPA are the distributors of the file sharing software which condones piracy. So he shows proof that the backers of SOPA backed piracy for years.

The SOPA act will basically make you a convicted felon for posting a video of you reciting a copyrighted song over karaoke at your wedding, or displaying a cartoon character on your facebook page.

And websites like youtube, facebook, tumblr, reddit, yahoo mail, email sites, and EVEN this website, the site where you post your opinions on political manners and such could be indefinitely blocked! What would YOU do if that happens?

Basically the internet would become like China's censored internet while the slightest thing will send the police arresting you and charging you with felonies.

One supporter of the SOPA bill, GoDaddy has recently backed out, claiming to be "Neutral" on the bill since thousands of customers have left GoDaddy, Taking their 14,000+ Domains with them.

And now since the backlash is growing, GoDaddy is now obstructing the process of domain transfers.
What does that mean? They aren't letting you transfer your domain because they want your money and they want this backlash to stop.

Do YOU want to browse the internet in a police state?
And what would you do when you are affected by this bill? Nothing?

You could basically say goodby to your fair use rights and first amendment rights.

Fair use is a limitation and exception to the exclusive right granted by copyright law to the author of a creative work. In United States copyright law, fair use is a doctrine that permits limited use of copyrighted material without acquiring permission from the rights holders. Examples of fair use include commentary, criticism, news reporting, research, teaching, library archiving and scholarship. It provides for the legal, unlicensed citation or incorporation of copyrighted material in another author's work under a four-factor balancing test. The term fair use originated in the United States. A similar principle, fair dealing, exists in some other common law jurisdictions. Civil law jurisdictions have other limitations and exceptions to copyright.

Late last week saw the domain registrar Go Daddy lose over 21,000 domains. Why did this happen to a service which was doing pretty well for itself for so long? In an acronym, SOPA.

Go Daddy along with several other organizations, most notably the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America, was in support of the controversial &#8220;Stop Online Piracy Act&#8221; or SOPA. But due to the growing community of opposition to the bill, coupled with a boycott of Go Daddy, forced the web hosting company&#8217;s CEO Warren Adelman to make a public announcement stating that it would end its support of the bill until the time &#8220;when and if the Internet community supports it.&#8221;

All this was thanks to an anti-Go Daddy thread on Reddit and Godaddyboycott.org. The latter was set up specifically to let people point out their disapproval of the company&#8217;s stance on the bill.

But what is all the fuss about? Well, SOPA, along with PIPA (Protect IP Act) are bills that were introduced to congress this fall and would make it easier for the Justice Department, and copyright holders, to shut down websites allegedly dedicated to piracy. This bill would make unauthorized streaming of copyrighted material a crime, punishable with a maximum penalty of five years in prison. And while you might agree that there needs to be some policy in place to protect copyrighted material online (as I do), this is not the bill to do it.

First, its main goal, to stop piracy, would not even be achieved as Edward Black (president and CEO of the Computer and Communications Industry Association) noted in the Huffington Post that &#8220;it would do little to stop actual pirate websites, which could simply reappear hours later under a different name, if their numeric web addresses aren&#8217;t public even sooner. Anyone who knows or has that web address would still be able to reach the offending website.&#8221; But more importantly, it is a slippery slope to begin censoring the internet, a terrible thing to happen to a country which prides itself on its right to freedom of speech. And I&#8217;d like to note how strange it is that congress is even considering this bill after criticizing China for having a censored internet.

Other problems that would stem from the bill if it should pass would include a degradation of cyber security due to the harmful process of enforcing the law, hurting the Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC), and the negative impact it would have on the only part of the US economy giving it an edge; the tech industry and web-related startups.

But perhaps the greatest threat is to websites that rely on user generated content. Sites like YouTube and Facebook would be put in the awkward position of having to police their sites or be branded a pirating websites and thus be shut down. And if they are moderated and policed, they are effectively no longer the YouTube and Facebook we&#8217;ve grown to know and love.

Both these bills, although delayed are very much still alive in congress and will be discussed and put up to a vote once congress returns from its winter recess. To find out more information on the bills that Google, Yahoo!, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, AOL, eBay, Mozilla Corporation, Wikimedia Foundation, Reporters Without Borders, ACLU and Human Rights Watch are all opposing and the issues at stake, please take a few minutes to watch the video below and go to FightForTheFuture.org to sign a petition opposing the bills that will be sent to your representative.

So thats about $7 for a domain name and $10 a year to host (the lowest service)

Even though it recanted (somewhat unconvincingly) its support of the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), domain registrar GoDaddy continues to lose thousands of domains as an online campaign to punish GoDaddy is proving highly effective.

The boycott campaign began on reddit on December 22. A day later GoDaddy announced its withdrawal of support for the House legislation it actually helped craft.

And still GoDaddy has lost more than 70,000 domains in less than a week, with the prospect of more if the reddit-inspired day of boycott set for December 29 goes off as planned.

GoDaddy goes from racy ads to the truly offensive

Make no mistake: The boycott's impact on GoDaddy is minimal at the moment. With more than 50 million domains under its management (according to GoDaddy, anyway), 70,000 domains is a little more than a tenth of one percent of the total.

But what if that 70,000 grows to 700,000, or 1 million? That's what GoDaddy is reacting to, because the Achilles heel of nearly every Internet company is the low barrier to switching. Online consumers have an inordinate amount of power, because they have to ability to just walk away.

Unlike utility companies that charge hefty termination fees or require contracts, Internet companies must constantly be on guard against offending or outraging customers, because if there are viable alternatives available, the customers will walk.

Just look what happened to Netflix this year when it announced a 60% price hike. Or Digg when it unveiled an unpopular redesign. Or Myspace when Facebook gave users a more satisfying experience.

Transferring a domain is a hassle, but it's a low barrier in the big picture, especially if you're fueled by anger and outrage. The problem for GoDaddy is its abandonment of SOPA is reactive and transparently insincere.

&#8220;Fighting online piracy is of the utmost importance, which is why Go Daddy has been working to help craft revisions to this legislation &#8211; but we can clearly do better,&#8221; said GoDaddy CEO Warren Adelman in a statement. &#8220;It&#8217;s very important that all Internet stakeholders work together on this. Getting it right is worth the wait. Go Daddy will support it when and if the Internet community supports it.&#8221;

So worth the wait that GoDaddy was lobbying for passage of the bill it helped craft even though the legislation actually didn't "get it right"! Way to stick up for us against this intrusive and abusive legislation, GoDaddy!

SOPA would empower the U.S. Department of Justice and copyright holders to seek court orders blocking payment processors and online ad networks from conducting business with foreign sites suspected of copyright infringement.

It also would allow the DoJ to seek court orders barring search engines from linking to sites reportedly posting copyrighted content, as well as forcing domain registrars and ISPs to block access to such sites.

It's probably shouldn't be a surprise that GoDaddy appears to have been singled out for punishment by opponents of SOPA, since it's so easy to punish an Internet company. Here's a list of the other companies that SOPA opponents want boycotted.

Among the unsurprising on the list are Time Warner, Wal-Mart, Sony Music Entertainment and CBS. But what are Taylor Guitars and Tiffany doing there? Newt, can you put in a word with your friends at Tiffany?

In recent weeks we discovered BitTorrent pirates at the RIAA, Sony, Fox, Universal and even law-abiding organizations such as the Department of Homeland Security. By now it should be clear that people are using BitTorrent pretty much everywhere, and not only for lawful downloads. Today we can add the U.S. House of Representatives to that list, the place where lawmakers are drafting the much discussed &#8220;Stop Online Piracy Act&#8221; (SOPA).

houseYouHaveDownloaded is a treasure trove full of incriminating data on alleged BitTorrent pirates in organizations all across the world.

Unauthorized downloads occur even in the most unexpected of places, from the palace of the French President, via the Church of God, to the RIAA.

Although we don&#8217;t plan to go on forever trawling the archives, we felt that there was at least one place that warranted further investigation &#8211; the U.S. House of Representatives. Since it&#8217;s the birthplace of the pending SOPA bill, we wondered how many of the employees there have engaged in unauthorized copying.

The answer is yet again unambiguous &#8211; they pirate a lot.

In total we found more than 800 IP-addresses assigned to the U.S. House of Representatives from where content has been shared on BitTorrent. After a closer inspection it quickly became clear the House isn&#8217;t just using it for legitimate downloads either, quite the opposite.

Below we&#8217;ll list a few of the 800 hits we found on YouHaveDownloaded, which in turn represent just a fraction of total downloads since the site only tracks a limited percentage of total BitTorrent traffic. Again, this is real and confirmed data that is just as good as the evidence used by the RIAA when they sued tens of thousands of people for file-sharing.

Something that immediately caught our eye are the self-help books that are downloaded in the House. &#8220;Crucial Conversations- Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High,&#8221; for example, may indeed be of interest to the political elite in the United States. And &#8220;How to Answer Hard Interview Questions And Everything Else You Need to Know to Get the Job You Want&#8221; may be helpful for those who aspire to higher positions.

Books tend to be popular in the House because we found quite a few more, including &#8220;Do Not Open &#8211; An Encyclopedia of the World&#8217;s Best-Kept Secrets&#8221; and &#8220;How Things Work Encyclopedia&#8221;. But of course the people at the heart of democracy are also downloading familiar content such as Windows 7, popular TV-shows and movies.

And there was another category we ran into more than we would have wanted too. It appears that aside from self-help books, House employees are also into adult themed self-help videos. We&#8217;ll list one of the least explicit here below, but that&#8217;s just the tip of the iceberg.

While Drafting SOPA, the U.S. House Harbors BitTorrent Pirates

Ernesto
December 26, 2011
13
ip address,
sopa
Print

In recent weeks we discovered BitTorrent pirates at the RIAA, Sony, Fox, Universal and even law-abiding organizations such as the Department of Homeland Security. By now it should be clear that people are using BitTorrent pretty much everywhere, and not only for lawful downloads. Today we can add the U.S. House of Representatives to that list, the place where lawmakers are drafting the much discussed &#8220;Stop Online Piracy Act&#8221; (SOPA).

houseYouHaveDownloaded is a treasure trove full of incriminating data on alleged BitTorrent pirates in organizations all across the world.

Unauthorized downloads occur even in the most unexpected of places, from the palace of the French President, via the Church of God, to the RIAA.

Although we don&#8217;t plan to go on forever trawling the archives, we felt that there was at least one place that warranted further investigation &#8211; the U.S. House of Representatives. Since it&#8217;s the birthplace of the pending SOPA bill, we wondered how many of the employees there have engaged in unauthorized copying.

The answer is yet again unambiguous &#8211; they pirate a lot.

In total we found more than 800 IP-addresses assigned to the U.S. House of Representatives from where content has been shared on BitTorrent. After a closer inspection it quickly became clear the House isn&#8217;t just using it for legitimate downloads either, quite the opposite.

Below we&#8217;ll list a few of the 800 hits we found on YouHaveDownloaded, which in turn represent just a fraction of total downloads since the site only tracks a limited percentage of total BitTorrent traffic. Again, this is real and confirmed data that is just as good as the evidence used by the RIAA when they sued tens of thousands of people for file-sharing.

Something that immediately caught our eye are the self-help books that are downloaded in the House. &#8220;Crucial Conversations- Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High,&#8221; for example, may indeed be of interest to the political elite in the United States. And &#8220;How to Answer Hard Interview Questions And Everything Else You Need to Know to Get the Job You Want&#8221; may be helpful for those who aspire to higher positions.

house

house

Books tend to be popular in the House because we found quite a few more, including &#8220;Do Not Open &#8211; An Encyclopedia of the World&#8217;s Best-Kept Secrets&#8221; and &#8220;How Things Work Encyclopedia&#8221;. But of course the people at the heart of democracy are also downloading familiar content such as Windows 7, popular TV-shows and movies.

house

house

And there was another category we ran into more than we would have wanted too. It appears that aside from self-help books, House employees are also into adult themed self-help videos. We&#8217;ll list one of the least explicit here below, but that&#8217;s just the tip of the iceberg.

house

Although the above is interesting, as the House is the place where lawmakers are currently trying to push though SOPA, this revelation might actually help their cause. If even people at the House are &#8220;stealing&#8221; content, we really need SOPA to counter it, they may say.

The question is though, whether SOPA will be able to break the habits of millions of Americans, as there will always be alternatives available. And even if it manages to put a dent in the current piracy rates, is that really worth it considering the potential damage SOPA can do to the open Internet and legal businesses?

Let&#8217;s see if &#8220;[ame="http://www.amazon.com/Crucial-Conversations-Tools-Talking-Stakes/dp/0071401946"]Crucial Conversations &#8211; Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High[/ame]&#8221; has some advice&#8230;.

An online petition urging President Obama to veto a controversial anti-online piracy bill has passed the number of signatures required to receive an official response.

The petition, which is on the White House's official "We the People" page, urges the president to veto the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and "any other future bills that threaten to diminish the free flow of information."

The petition now has more than 34,000 signatures. It needed 25,000 before Jan. 17 for the White House to issue an official response.

SOPA would empower the Justice Department and copyright holders to demand that search engines, Internet providers and ad networks cut off access to sites "dedicated" to copyright infringement.

The legislation is aimed at blocking foreign sites such as The Pirate Bay that offer illegal copies of movies, music and television shows with impunity.

A broad coalition, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Hollywood, the recording industry and organized labor, strongly back the legislation. They argue online copyright infringement is hurting businesses and destroying jobs.

But consumer groups and major Web companies, including Google, Yahoo and Facebook, warn SOPA would stifle innovation and censor free speech.

The White House petition, which gained popularity on the discussion site Reddit, includes a link to an image of a person behind bars and the headline, "This is a copyrighted image."

The link is meant to demonstrate that websites should not be blocked just because their users post copyrighted material.

"It would be ridiculous for an [Internet service provider] to block the entire whitehouse.gov domain on court order because a single user posted a link," the petition author wrote. "It is difficult for any web administrator to know which links to copyrighted material are done with permission."

SOPA would require a court to determine that a website is "dedicated" to copyright infringement, so it is unlikely that a single infringing link would result in a website being blocked.

&#8220;This petition is irrelevant because it does not apply to the Stop Online Piracy Act," House Judiciary Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas), SOPA's sponsor, said in an email. "Contrary to what the petition says, the Stop Online Piracy Act specifically targets foreign criminals that steal America&#8217;s products and profits. This bill applies to foreign illegal websites, not lawful domestic sites like whitehouse.gov. And it requires a court order before any action is taken, not just a claim by an individual as some critics wrongly assert."

"The petition is meaningless because it is based on fiction rather than facts. This bill protects America&#8217;s innovations, preserves American jobs and promotes the American economy,&#8220; Smith said.

President Obama has not yet taken a position on the bill, but Smith told The Hill last week he expects the president will sign it.

The House Judiciary Committee is expected to vote on the legislation when Congress is back in session. The Senate version of the bill, the Protect IP Act, passed the Senate Judiciary Committee in May and will come up for a vote in the full chamber next month.

GoDaddy not only helped write #SOPA they are also exempt from it. Scumbags.

You may have heard about the mass exodus of customers from GoDaddy due to their support of SOPA. You may have also heard that GoDaddy no longer supports SOPA. The problem is, only one of those things is true. While GoDaddy no longer publicly supports SOPA, that is just a PR move. They have not withdrawn official support for the bill, let alone actually come out in opposition to it. But it gets worse. According to [THIS ARTICLE], not only did GoDaddy help write the damn thing, they are also exempt from complying with the law!

Rep. Jared Polis (D-CO), the only member of Congress present at the hearing with any tech experience, having founded several web companies, introduced two amendments: one to exclude universities and non-profits from being subject do having to shut down their own domain servers if accused of piracy under SOPA, and the other to exempt dynamic IP addresses, such as those found on web-enabled printers. Both were voted down.

Polis pointed out that SOPA and Smith&#8217;s amendment already excluded certain operators of sub-domains, such as GoDaddy.com, from being subject to shutdowns under SOPA.

I was willing to forgive and forget if they actually changed sides and informed Congress of their official opposition to this bill. But they never will. They are too far in bed with the scumbags in Congress who are writing the bill. In my opinion GoDaddy is a lost cause. Let the boycott continue!

UPDATE: This post is currently on Reddit&#8217;s front page. Thanks! I&#8217;m getting tons of views but not a lot of people are clicking through to the linked article. Be sure to go read it. Don&#8217;t just take my word. I&#8217;ve also been seeing comments around the internet about this issue which point out that GoDaddy is not specifically named as exempt in this bill. This is true, but that&#8217;s not what the article claims. It claims that companies like GoDaddy are exempted and that GoDaddy helped write it.

UPDATE 2: There is a little controversy and confusion in the comments section. The fact that GoDaddy helped write the law and the fact that they are exempt are not necessarily related. We don&#8217;t know that they wrote an exemption for themselves. Please don&#8217;t jump to conclusions. GoDaddy themselves just say, via their press release, that they helped redefine terms in the law and proposed limitations on DNS filtering, etc. I see where the confusion comes from. But please, read the article I sourced AND THAT ARTICLE&#8217;S SOURCES. Again, don&#8217;t take my word on any of this. Read things for yourself. It will be made much more clear. Honestly, this post is just blog spam that got lucky on Reddit. The original article that I linked to is what should have been posted to Reddit, but since it was me, I feel obligated to make sure as many people as possible actually read the source. Thanks!

7 years ago we got a child pornography filter on the Internet in Denmark. Some people said that it was a bad idea, but others said these people were just paedophiles, or trying to help paedophiles. Some people said that it was against our constitution, which it was. So the censorship was implemented in a way so it was formally (but not in reality) voluntary, which ensured that it was not formally a violation of our constitution.

Some people warned that once the censorship infrastructure was in place, it would most likely be used to censor other things. But they were told "Never! This is ONLY to prevent this horrible crime, and will never be used for other censorship."

Fast-forward a few years, and the Danish recording industry did not like allofmp3.com, so they went to court to get a court order against the Danish ISPs to start censoring allofmp3 off the Danish Internet. The judge basically said "ahh, you already have the infrastructure in place, so there will be no extra cost", and issued the order to censor allofmp3.com. It was not a violation of our constitution because it was ordered by a judge.

Since then other "pirate" sites have been censored. Most notably The Pirate Bay, which found out that the court would not even allow them to speak their case in court, or even submit a written brief.

Then our politicians found out that they wanted to protect and expand income from taxes. In particular the high taxes gambling providers pay. The official excuse was to limit the horrible disease of ludomania. So they decided that foreign gambling providers had to pay the taxes in Denmark too if they were on the Internet and could be seen in Denmark. If they refused to pay taxes, they should be censored off the Danish internet. So they passed a law saying that if a foreign gambling provider refused to pay taxes in Denmark, a court would - on the request of our government - have to order ISPs to censor its sites off the net, and payment processors to block all payments to it. If an ISP does not censor, or a payment processor or bank does not block payment, hefty fines are issued.

Now our politicians worry that some foreign companies selling medicines on the net are not licensed to sell medicines in Denmark. So they are preparing new legislation that will censor these sites off the net, and block payments to them.

So our Internet censorship started a few years ago with a very limited purpose and good intentions. And it was solemnly promised that nothing else than child pornography would be censored.

But once the infrastructure for censorship was in place, the censorship started spreading to other areas. And the censorship is getting more and more widespread.

Man, land piracy is of more concern to me. You are beginning sound more like our space nuts who would like to spend billions to explore space and find out if we can grow vegetation in space, while humankind on Planet Earth has its hand full with troubles.

Useful Searches

About USMessageBoard.com

USMessageBoard.com was founded in 2003 with the intent of allowing all voices to be heard. With a wildly diverse community from all sides of the political spectrum, USMessageBoard.com continues to build on that tradition. We welcome everyone despite political and/or religious beliefs, and we continue to encourage the right to free speech.

Come on in and join the discussion. Thank you for stopping by USMessageBoard.com!